'Net Features : facebook apps

Top E-Commerce Apps for Facebook

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:28:00 GMT

2009 was perhaps the single worst year for e-commerce. Consequently, it was one of the best for those merchants involved in social media.

So how does one effectively combine the two for profit and brand awareness? Facebook. Let's review a few applications that could help your e-commerce venture succeed in the social media space - particularly on Facebook.

According to a recent study from ForeSee Results Inc., 25% of the top 100 retailers have no formal Facebook presence and another 25% have fewer than 10,000 fans. Just imagine how that percentage changes as you move away from the biggest retailers and into the far deeper pool of merchants struggling to sell online. According to that same report, of 69% of online shoppers who say they use social media sites, 56% follow at least one retailer on at least one social network. It should be clear that most retailers are missing opportunities to engage consumers. Shoppers who interact with a company on a social media site report being more satisfied, more committed to the brand and more likely to make future purchases from that company.

So how do you get your e-commerce store more involved with Facebook?

Storefront with Payvment: Payvment is an e-commerce application that allows for the development of a retail store on Facebook. Using the PayPal X global open payments platform, customers can shop from multiple vendors in a single shopper cart, turning FB into what could be considered the ultimate shopping mall. The application uses PayPal’s new Adaptive Payments APIs and is built on the company’s existing shopping cart Web service that turns any online page into an e-commerce page with a single line of code. Another e-commerce app that lets users post products on FB is My Merch Store from Zazzle. Create and post products for sale on Zazzle and share them with people visiting your pages on FB.

E-Newsletters with NutshellMail: NutshellMail provides a web-based service that lets lets any Facebook page administrator create an automated email newsletter campaign. Users add an “Email Newsletter” tab to their page, letting fans opt-in to receiving emails that highlight recent content from your page. The app collects recent activity from your page, organizes it into an email and delivers it to Facebook subscribers per their delivery preferences. Subscribers can also comment, like, share or post comments back to your page directly through email. And administrators can determine how often an email update is sent out to fans.

Promotions on Facebook: Here's an application that we at Website Magazine have some intimate exposure with. The Promotions Facebook app lets companies create and promote interactive promotions and marketing campaigns (including contests, sweepstakes, coupons and giveaways) on Facebook Fan Pages. There is a free version available, but the pricing is actually quite modest. White label solutions are available.

Take Cool Content Hot on Facebook: SlideShare is a Web community for sharing presentations. The Slideshare app for Facebook allows users to upload presentations, documents, PDFs, and mp3s into their groups, pages or profiles. This app could be used to show product demos (if available on YouTube), provide product demonstrations or even deliver coupons.

Offline Goes Online with Eventbrite: For those promoting offline events, nothing could be finer than Eventbrite. When users publish events on Eventbrite, all they need to do is select the Publish to Facebook option and a new event page will be published directly on FB with event details and a link to buy tickets. The event is also promoted through your newsfeed on FB.

Video with Facebook Video: Perhaps one of the most powerful apps available to e-commerce merchants is Facebook Video, which enables users to share videos of informational presentations, product demonstrations, even company commercials. While chances are good that fewer merchants have video capabilities than social media capabilities, pairing the two could make for a good stream of content to members of your community.

Take the Pulse of Your Fan Pages: An excellent application to let Facebook Page administrators survey their fans is Polls. The app makes it very easy to create surveys and pretty simple to analyze results with some detailed graphs of user responses across demographics. (untested-unlinked)

Testimonials on Facebook
Client testimonials are a powerful means to increase conversion on your Facebook page. Applications such as iEndorse enable you to collect endorsements from clients for the purpose of building business relationships and reputation for those providing products and services. Users of the app can also find your company within the app's business database. (untested-unlinked)

These are just a few of the apps WM discovered on the application market at Facebook. Share what apps you use to build and promote your e-commerce venture online by commenting below.

Omniture App Measurement for Facebook

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Omniture has created a new tool designed to measure the popularity and success of Facebook applications. Dubbed App Measurement for Facebook, it utilizes the reporting capabilities of the company's online analytics solution SiteCatalyst. The tool is now available for SiteCatalyst customers and is part of the Omniture Online Marketing Suite.

With App Measurement for Facebook, marketers can better understand their users and their engagement with applications. By understanding the relationships among Facebook, site traffic and online channels, marketers are poised to make a big impact with apps and make make more informed, data-driven decisions for social media.

Brett Error, CTO and executive vice president, products at Omniture says: "With more than 200 million active users, marketers are intrigued by the potential of Facebook to help them connect with consumers in personalized and meaningful ways. Yet the relatively young phenomenon of social media has forced marketers to rely on experimentation to tap into that potential. The App Measurement for Facebook solution will deliver actionable insight concerning Facebook applications and help marketers develop data-driven social media marketing strategies that support and positively affect efforts across other online channels."

Sample of the Application Funnel Conversion Report within Omniture's SiteCatalyst:

E-Commerce: SortPrice Facebook App for Merchants

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:35:00 GMT

Shopping search engine SortPrice is expanding its merchant store application on the Facebook Platform.

Available only to Sortprice merchants, the free application works with merchants' existing Sortprice product listings, allowing them to build virtual stores on Facebook. Recent enhancements enable shoppers to compile a wish list of items from a particular merchant's store that are viewable to all users and are the foundation for a truly interactive shopping experience. Visitors can comment on other users' wish lists, indicate particular items that they like, and even invite friends and family to check out wish lists or specific products.

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While it's up for debate whether Facebook users are shopping on the social networking site or even adding products to wish lists, merchants using Sortprice should be using the app if only for the potential for additional exposure. Many of the service's current clients are currently using the app, including PetSmart, SpyTown, and AmericaRX. "Our sales are beginning to ramp up," said Rian Cool, outbound marketing manager of CharityUSA, one Sortprice merchant using the application. "Many people are on Facebook all day long, so it's kind of like having them on our store all day long. With how the application behaves, it's a huge plus for us to have a large volume of outbound links available on Facebook to our product landing pages."

"The positive response from merchants who have utilized this application since it was introduced eight months ago has been nothing short of tremendous," said Asaf Klibansky, Sortprice co-founder and CTO. "Many of them are witnessing substantial increases in traffic and sales, and with these improvements, those numbers should only continue to rise."

Inside Facebook Classifieds: A Web Marketer's Dream?

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:41:00 GMT

This one sort of skirts on the edge of interest for Web professionals, but with some creative thinking, I'm sure you can make it work (wink, wink).

Facebook relaunched Facebook Marketplace (now powered by Oodle) to let its users create, share and respond to classifieds listings.

Late last year, Facebook turned to Oodle for its expertise in online classifieds, and Oodle has built an entirely new version of the Marketplace app focused on giving people a place to buy, sell or give things away to the people they know. FB users can sell pretty much anything for a profit, sell it for a cause (see below), give it away or ask for things they need. I hope you can see the value in using the app - even it's just for fun. Give away your most recent white paper, sell your product and give the proceeds away to a charity, etc. The opportunity is truly unlimited.

Facebook is also introducing new features including Sell for a Cause, which allows FB users to donate the profits of the items sold to over a million participating charities including UNICEF, the Sierra Club and local organizations like the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco.

Facebook API: Status, Notes, Links and Video

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:14:00 GMT

Facebook announced the release of several APIs for their platform over the weekend.

Content developers have been openly clamoring for access to new interfaces like these: Facebook status, Notes, Links (posted items), and Video. Developers' applications will now be able to direct access to all of a user's visible status, links and notes via new methods and FQL (Facebook Query Language) calls.

Facebook has also created new APIs for developers to post links, create notes or upload videos for users, and made setting a user's status easier. Clearly, these improvements are made to bring other sites into the Facebook fold. Potential is limitless really. There is a good example of how a travel website might use the new API, but virtually any dynamic site could use Facebook Connect now to allow users to post links from their site and even feature links that a site's users have shared.

Developing a Facebook App? Make It Fun!

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:27:00 GMT

If you're thinking about creating a Facebook application to promote your website, you should now that most of the popular ones are geared towards having "fun" reports the Flowing Data blog. Of the 23.160 Facebook applications, the most popular were in the categories of "having fun," "gaming" and "sports". "Dating" and "Chat" are also high on the list. If you are developing applicatins in the utility or music categories (money, classifieds and file sharing consequently were the least popular) for promotion on the social network, understand that what most Facebook users are most interested in is simply having fun.

Tags: facebook facebook apps applications social apps development social applications
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